


Five Things Sherlock Ate That Agreed with Him

by Unovis



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, Backstory, Family, Food, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-27
Updated: 2011-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-19 23:09:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unovis/pseuds/Unovis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the title says.<br/>Five things, followed by expansions on each of them.<br/>Repost to AO3 from January 2011</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things Sherlock Ate That Agreed with Him

1.  
He was seven when he encountered his first lobster. “Children don’t like lobster,” said Aunt May. She was an aunt by marriage, not blood; blood meant things, he was discovering. She shooed Mycroft ahead, past the tank. Sherlock tarried. May did not have shooing privileges regarding him. This particular lobster, hunkered behind a clump of artificial vegetation, looked furious and bored. Sherlock tapped the glass and nodded at it. The lobster nodded back.

It was interesting, he decided. He liked the texture and taste and dissection at table, with linen and china and waiters in attendance. He kept it down. He did not have nightmares. He never repeated the experiment.

2.  
There was also a pleasant piglet at Uncle Siger’s place, when he was ten, who bit Mycroft. Aunt Charlotte let him keep the skull, with Cook’s help. It was his favorite Christmas dinner.

3.  
Vegetarianism was a sentimental inconvenience, he decided at twenty-two. It had been an interesting inconvenience to others, for a time. It had prompted some of the vilest dinners imaginable, at school. Fasting was preferable. “A delicate digestion,” he found, protected him from fibrous extremes and fried monstrosities.

His mother had no talent for cooking, or indeed, for eating. She had one dish. She produced it for Sherlock only--rationally, he knew it was because Mycroft loathed raisins and his father disliked all sweets. Irrationally, and correctly, he knew it was because he was extraordinary. Rice pudding, warm, soft, expressionless, was a grateful comfort on his stomach. Eaten at the kitchen table, at midnight, in the midst of sticky pots and cups and bowls and Mummy opposite, with a drop of dried cream on her chin, he could talk, or not, and she’d listen.

4.  
Angelo made a superior risotto. He learned it from his mother and his grandmother. He was allowed to produce it in his uncle’s ristorante. He was fired, after being caught sneaking plates of it to a pathetic specimen, a cadaverous, rude, drug-addled sod who drove away business. Well, as fired as a relative could be. His uncle knew a man who knew a man who knew a fence.

Following his little difficulty, Angelo was able, through secret savings, to open his own restaurant. He was dissuaded, with threats, from naming his risotto on the menu after its most avid consumer.

5.  
John, it transpired, after Sarah had finally gone home, after they’d cleaned off the filth of the tunnel floor, after they'd settled in pajamas and dressing gowns, could cook one thing. Without raisins, but Sherlock intended to enlarge his repertoire.

  
***  
**The Lobster**

You might ask how a seven year old child out to dinner with his brother and impatient, scornful relatives managed to be served a lobster of his very own. A lobster with whom he had just established a sort of rapport.

It wasn’t pleasant. _That_ side of the family rarely was.

The facts were these:

“The fact was,” said Sherlock, snapping a breadstick, “my uncle Merk was at odds with my father. Sharply, that month; over politics, I thought.”

“What kind of name is Merk?” asked John. He rather liked lobster. He was sorry to add this to Sherlock’s banned-for-life in-front-of-me list.

“Short for Mercutio. Shut up.”

Mercutio and Sherrinford Holmes did not get along. Some childhood rivalry that they never outgrew, Sherlock’s mother assumed. Take it as a caution, she told Sherlock, tucking him into bed, brushing a curl from his forehead. “Family is precious.”

Family was contentious, inconvenient, and obnoxious, in young Sherlock’s opinion. Except for his mother. And Aunt Charlotte. And his sometimes fascinating cousin El. But El died.

“My cousin died and the family was forced together for the weekend. There was no funeral, only a memorial service. You know the kind of thing for children; white everywhere.” He flapped a hand negligently.

“How young?” asked John. Sherlock was still frowning at the menu, not looking at his face.

“Ten. We didn’t attend.”

By we, he meant Mycroft and himself. His father gave them the choice; Sherlock was curious about seeing a corpse, a dead body of someone he knew. He’d seen dead (very dead) animals in the road or garden, but never a real, dead person. And a dead El would doubtless be an extremely interesting example of the sort. El was smart and funny and talked wonderfully well. Possibly he could touch him. Before he could ask, Mycroft told him there would be no body there, so Sherlock shrugged no.

“We went to dinner at the hotel restaurant and there were lobsters in a tank in the entry. I thought it was an aquarium at first.”

They’re food, said Mycroft, as Aunt May pushed him away. “Leave it, Sherlock. People eat them.” Sherlock looked at the angry, bored lobster, waiting in the tank. With his rock and his artificial sea-grass and his broken antenna. Behind him, his father and uncle came in, arguing. Mother was in the room, with a sick headache. “I want him,” said Sherlock, tapping on the glass. The lobster’s antenna brushed the other side. If anyone could rescue the lobster from this boring cage, this imminent danger, it was his father. He’d read that lobsters were intelligent. He’d call him El.

“Uncle Merk thought we were spoilt children. My father believed in free will. I told him I wanted to try eating a lobster, and he indulged me. He wouldn’t have, if Merk hadn’t disapproved. And Father hated eating out, and nothing was more likely to ruin dinner and mortify Merk and May than the spectacle of a child with a giant red boiled marine bug on his plate.”

Lobster’s too rich for children, said his uncle. “He’ll have nightmares. He’ll be sick.” The lobster scrabbled back, curling its tail. “Won’t,” said Sherlock. They had money. Nobody could be allergic to something underwater. “The boy knows his mind,” said his father, and gestured for a waiter, and Sherlock allowed himself to be shooed to the table.

“So, you didn’t like it? It made you sick? You pitched a fit?” John finished his wine. Their waiter had gone missing.

It was the style of that restaurant to serve lobster sitting up on the plate, antennae curling wide, its split tail splayed behind. Oh, thought Sherlock. So, that’s death. He looked from El’s still, furious, face to Merk, who was scowling, to May, who was tightly disapproving, to Mycroft, who was distressed, to his father, who was paying close attention. “Show me how,” he said, and his father smiled and began a lesson.

“It was disappointing,” Sherlock said abruptly. He shrugged. “Not worth the fuss. I’ll have the risotto.”

“For someone who’s lived such an interesting life, you tell the worst anecdotes,” said John. There was a lie there, somewhere. He looked across the table at his friend and tried to imagine that expression on a little face.

  
***  
**The Piglet**

He enjoyed it more than any other Christmas he’d remembered. His father was in Patagonia and Mummy and Aunt Charlotte were always happy in each other’s company. Cook asked Sherlock what he would and would not eat and allowed him to sit in the kitchen and showed him different knives and how to sharpen them. No one but Mycroft commented on his choices at table.

After the lovely dinner, Sherlock went off meat altogether.

He didn’t act particularly upset over the piglet being eaten (even if the dear thing _had_ bitten Mycroft; but not very hard). Although it wasn’t on his list, he consumed a long, shreddy slice of its fragrant flesh. He picked raisins from its eyesockets and flicked them at Mycroft’s plate. He left the table suddenly, went to their room, vomited on the carpet, and took a nap.

Uncle Siger sulked in the dairy. He’d explained to too many women in the house that the boy was perfectly delighted in the sheep’s eye Cook had given him to cut up on his own. He assumed the little ghoul (addressed to the milking machine and overheard) would be fine, watching the slaughter. He maintained an injured air through the extraction and gifting of the skull. An odor of blame followed him for the week, regardless.

Sherlock never talked about it.

*

“Kkkkck.”

“Quiet,” said Lestrade, wiping his face.

“Kick. It kicked.”

“Try to sleep.”

  
***

**Rice Pudding**

When Sherlock was 17, his father fell off Hvannadalshnúkur into a crevasse and never came out. Dead, said the telegram. Were telegrams used for any other kind of news?

Mrs. Holmes took the shock surprisingly well. Mycroft...as far as anyone could tell, Mycroft experienced only two stages of grief. After Distaste, he stalled at Polite Disbelief. There would have been little point in progressing to Exacting Revenge, not against nature herself, though circumstances were still under investigation. Mycroft was closer to one side of his father, Sherlock to another. Mummy had no sides.

“Must have been hard on your parents,” said John, rummaging for a clean spoon. “Bringing up a human lie-detector.” His ears were pink; he was annoyed.

“Not that I noticed.”

I want you to apologize to Mycroft, said Mummy. She swept the back of a butter knife across the top of the teacup she used for measuring rice. She was precise in her unorthodoxy; unlike most non-cooks (as Sherlock would not know until later in life, when he made it a point of inquiry), when driven to perform, she did not rely anxiously on the proper tools and tightly worded instructions. She understood proportions innately. She _could_ have learned to cook, had she had the slightest interest in it. Or in food. She left the catering arrangements to her husband and the cooks who drifted in and out. “He was fond of that girl and you were horrid to her.” Sherlock’s legs were too long now for his favorite chair. He set his heels on the cross-bar and rested his forearms on his upward-jutting knees. “She’s a grasping little climber with breast implants,” said Sherlock. “She lied about...”

“Yes, dear, so you informed us. Over lunch.” She poured milk to an invisible line inside the jug.

“Over luncheon at our table. In our house. Father wouldn’t have let her through the door.”  
  
“Your father was also fond of grasping little climbers.” Grains of rice crunched under her shoes as she carried the saucepan to the range. “And breasts.” Sherlock snorted. His mother was not using her secretly amused voice. “You were rude to your brother, to his guest, and to me.” She adjusted the flame under the pot. “You were rude to assume you knew more than anyone else at that table. You were foolish to think that neither Mycroft nor I saw that--saw her--oh, really, Sherlock!”

“Saw her ill-considered interest in the much more attractive, younger brother? The one alas without the breast fixation.” The one who had, nevertheless, been curious to gather tactile data. “The one who said what no one else would. The one who is being rewarded with pudding.” The one who was rolling a raisin between his fingers and comparing it to the nipple that had been thrust at his cheek.

“Apologize,” said Mummy. The spoon spattered white drops that sizzled on the hob. “Pudding in the pot is not pudding in the dish.” That was true. Sherlock watched her stir and wondered how she managed never to scorch the rice. Mycroft wasn’t expecting an apology. He was upstairs right now, plotting some unspeakable retribution; tit for tat, or should it be the reverse? But Mummy always wanted the unattainable from them.

“I’m sorry I embarrassed you,” he said softly. In the voice she liked. He looked up at her, between his lashes. He didn’t like what he saw. “I’m sorry I came home,” he said, without art.

“Where else would you go?” She took the bowl of raisins away from him. “Where in the wide, wicked world would this terrible son of mine lay his head?”

“On a cold, cold slab in the mortuary.” He peeked again. No better. Redirect. “When you said Father liked...”

“Do you miss him?” she asked across his question. Back to him, pouring the mix into the baking dish.

“Dead is dead.” He liked the flat finality of the phrase. When he’d spoken it to a girl in chem lab who was grizzling about her cat, she’d slapped his face. A gesture, he noticed, that was appreciated by the bench. He’d wanted to try it on Mummy. She shut the oven door. She crunched back across the floor to the table, carrying the dripping long spoon; she stepped around to his side and kissed his cheek. He flinched.

“He would have missed you dreadfully.” She handed him the spoon and sat in her chair. The oven made a faint burring noise. “Now, tell me why you’re home mid-term.” His mouth quirked. He licked the sweet sticky spoon.

*

“Liar,” grumbled John.

  
***  
**Risotto**

When Mummy stopped eating, so did Sherlock. When she began chemotherapy, so did Sherlock. When she went to hospital, Sherlock vanished.

*

“Anything on the menu, whatever you want, again, for you and your date.”

“Again--I’m not his date.”

“Good to see you. I’ll bring a candle.”

“Why do we come here? Sherlock?”

*

“Up.”

The man hauled him by an arm, which did his ribs no good. There was a boot print on his spine and glass in his bare knees and blood would be in his urine, if...the man grabbed his collar and he grayed out.

Chair. Wall against his back. Bare bum and thighs on cold, cold...

“You going to be sick? Head up.” Thick fingers lifted his chin. His trousers and pants were off. His socks were wet, his shoes were gone, a towel lay across his lap. Kitchen. He was half naked in a...restaurant kitchen. Having his face wiped like a child.

“You saved me?” _Idiot._ His voice sounded thick. He pushed away the hand.

“I saved you a bit.”

His eyes stung in the glare. His nose ran, his lip was split. His brain was slow, his mind fogged with want. M. His dose had been in reach, then gone. “I’m not concussed.”

“That was Tonno. You buy from Tonno, you’re a fool.”

“Yes thank you. I wasn’t buying.”

“Selling?” The man--he could see the man, now. Chin, shoulders, right thumb. Not a threat. Powerful, meaty back, 30s. Not the chef, handled knives and open flame. Smelled like...smelled like... “Who’d buy you? Bag of bones; you wouldn’t make soup.”

Shouldn’t have been Tonno. Should have been Spit and Nut, trading misties for information, money for... “Where are my clothes?” His pants, his trousers, his shoes. His wallet? His jacket fell open oddly when he groped for the seam. Split. Knife scratch on his side. He’d been skinned like a rabbit.

“Ask Tonno. Your shoes are drying. When did you eat?”

“Don’t be stupid.” He waved a hand and overbalanced. The man frowned.

“Don’t piss my floor. Toilet’s through there.” A bundle of cloth was dropped on his lap; blue baggy trousers and a cotton coat, smelling of bleach. Toilets had mirrors, but he badly wanted to wash his hands.

When he came out, his feet bare, his ankles and wrists exposed, shivering, the man had his back to him, Cutting carrots. It was late, he realized, too late for serving meals. Three, four a.m. His mobile was gone, his keys. He recognized this man? Or just his type. His ears: no, he hadn’t seen him before. What kind of kitchen doesn’t have a clock on the wall?

“Angelo,” said the man. “Angelo Marino.” He smelled...good. Sherlock’s stomach twisted. “Here.” He turned around, ladle in hand, and filled a cup with yellow liquid. “You keep this down, you get something better.”

“Where are my shoes? I don’t want that.” His body did. His body was a balking horse. His body took the cup, inhaled the scent, gulped it down. Chicken broth, a good one. With garlic, with something bitter that tasted like the man smelled. No money, no keys. No, worse, his keys his phone in criminal hands. The cup was empty. He licked his lips and the man smiled at him.

“What do you want?” he asked Angelo.

“Try this.” Now he was digging a spoon into a pan fresh from the oven. Sherlock was shaking his head when the man--Angelo--stepped back from the oven and his shoe crunched on something underfoot. Sherlock’s hands went out for the bowl. The cup bounced, without breaking. His eyes stung, his elbows were braced on his knees, the bowl was hot and fragrant and steadied by Angelo’s big hands around his. “Don’t drop it. Eat.”

“Why?” he said, around rice. Milk tender rice, savory, not sweet, but grateful in his mouth. His sore stomach, his gullet. He scraped the bottom of the bowl.

“I know you,” said Angelo. He took the small bowl away, returned it, refilled. “My mother knows you. Our street knows you. You found the knife.”

The knife...the skip, the old man stabbed. The sergeant shrugging him off. The wrong man arrested, released. The real killer beaten to death.

“You like the risotto?”

He nodded. His spoon scooped. He had no place safe to sleep tonight. The kitchen was looking warmer.

“My mother’s is better. Mama’s always is.”

*

“Say something. Set him straight.” John frowned. “You think it’s funny.”

“No.”

“Risotto, for two.” Billy set a candle and a small vase with a sprig of apple blossom on the table. Angelo produced dishes with a flourish, from a tray.

John’s frown remained. “But we didn’t order. I wanted the endive first.”

“Sex before dinner, salad after,” said Angelo, squeezing his shoulder. He smiled at Sherlock. “Mama sends hello to you and your mother.”

“I thought...”

“Thank her for me,” said Sherlock. His fork wobbled from Angelo’s pat to his back.

“I thought,” continued John, when Angelo left, “that you had no friends.”

She always added saffron to the broth. “Define friends,” said Sherlock.

  
***  
**John  
**

If John Watson, hypothetically, ever wants Sherlock Holmes to stand close behind him with his hand resting on John’s hip and his breath teasing John’s hair, he has only to begin measuring out rice and milk. If, again hypothetically, he wants Sherlock to brace himself on John’s shoulder and reach up, pressing into the length of John’s back, he has to remember to keep the raisins on that right top shelf. If, hypothetically, he ever wants to see Sherlock lick his lips...

*

“So we’re clear,” said John, already regretting the topic. “Friends: friends being people who...like you? Spend time with you, do favors, watch your back, enjoy talking to you?”

“Not always,” said Mycroft. He shifted his umbrella. John let the rain trickle over his jacket back. “Not inclusively. Not mutually. Not entire...”

“All right, all right. Definition deferred. You asked how many friends I thought he had, as if there were none.”

“In his mind, certainly.”

“But there are...he has friends. He has people who care for him. Care about him. Lestrade. Mike. Molly. Maybe. Angelo; Angelo’s mother asks after his, _your,_ mother, for Christ’s sake.” And Mycroft’s ring finger tightened on his umbrella handle. “He introduced me as his friend. Once.”

“Did he?” asked Mycroft. Raindrops fluttered away from the umbrella’s edge, as if repelled. “And what did you say to that?”

_Oh, guilt. Guilt’s boring!_ John scolded himself, in Sherlock’s voice. “Mrs Hudson. She dotes on him.”

“And other than yourself, whom has he called friend?”

Not for a dry collar, not for hot tea, would John step under Mycroft’s cover. “His skull,” said John.

“You’re talking about me. How predictable,” said Sherlock. His hands were in the pockets of his tweed coat. He stepped closer, until he was almost flat against John’s back, as if his personal aura would shelter them both. “You _make_ a funeral, Mycroft.”

“No one would object if you left. Did you really tell John that human skull you keep was your only friend?”

“I never said ‘only’,” interjected John. “Who are they burying? You didn't say.” He turned, tight in their space, to look at Sherlock. “Just that it was an uncle. One you’ve mentioned?”

“Mercutio,” said Sherlock. He sounded quietly satisfied. “The last of them. Though May could marry again. She seems to like it.” He smiled down at John, for John alone. They were on the pavement outside the churchyard railings, by winter lilac bushes. Rain-cloaked figures hurried past them, up to the church porch and doors. No one raised a face or hand in greeting. Sherlock had asked him to come for a “boring walk,” and, bored, he’d come. Then rain, funeral, and Mycroft, in Ealing. John wondered if the mysterious Mummy would be in attendance. If he were allowed to ask.

“Is there anyone I should meet?” he asked cautiously. Sherlock shrugged. Mycroft flicked a glance through them.

“We needn’t stay,” said Sherlock.

“Why did you come?” asked Mycroft, turning away.

“Bored,” said Sherlock. He took John’s arm and moved them down the street. John slid his fingers down Sherlock’s sleeve, into his pocket, chasing his hand. He stopped when they pressed into a plastic bag. He pulled it out.

“You don’t throw rice at funerals,” he said, laughing.

“No?”

*

(after death, after danger, after dinner, comes pudding)

* End *

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been remixed, handsomely, by Dryad as [Eton Mess](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Sherlock_Remix/works/3706065) for the Sherlock Remix Quick Round Challenge, 2015.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Eton Mess](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3706065) by [Dryad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dryad/pseuds/Dryad)




End file.
